the hope of youth! I see among those whom I count as listeners one by
whose side I have sat as a fellow-teacher, and by whose instructions
I have felt myself not too old to profit. As we borrowed him from
your city, I must take this opportunity of telling you that his zeal,
intelligence, and admirable faculty as an instructor were heartily and
universally recognized among us. We return him, as we trust, uninjured,
to the fellow-citizens who have the privilege of claiming him as their
own.
And now, gentlemen of the graduating class, nothing remains but for
me to bid you, in the name of those for whom I am commissioned and
privileged to speak, farewell as students, and welcome as practitioners.
I pronounce the two benedictions in the same breath, as the late king's
demise and the new king's accession are proclaimed by the same voice at
the same moment. You would hardly excuse me if I stooped to any meaner
dialect than the classical and familiar language of your prescriptions,
the same in which your title to the name of physician is, if, like
our own institution, you follow the ancient usage, engraved upon your
diplomas.
Valete, JUVENES, artis medicae studiosi; valete, discipuli, valete,
filii!
Salvete, VIRI, artis medicae magister; Salvete amici; salvete fratres!
MEDICAL LIBRARIES.
[Dedicatory Address at the opening of the Medical Library in Boston,
December 3, 1878.]
It is my appointed task, my honorable privilege, this evening, to speak
of what has been done by others. No one can bring his tribute of words
into the presence of great deeds, or try with them to embellish the
memory of any inspiring achievement, without feeling and leaving
with others a sense of their insufficiency. So felt Alexander when he
compared even his adored Homer with the hero the poet had sung. So felt
Webster when he contrasted the phrases of rhetoric with the eloquence
of patriotism and of self-devotion. So felt Lincoln when on the field of
Gettysburg he spoke those immortal words which Pericles could not have
bettered, which Aristotle could not have criticised. So felt he who
wrote the epitaph of the builder of the dome which looks down on the
crosses and weathercocks that glitter over London.
We are not met upon a battle-field, except so far as every laborious
achievement means a victory over opposition, indifference, selfishness,
faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as well as
matter,--inertia. We are not met in a cathedral, except so far as every
building whose walls are lined with the products of useful and ennobling
thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose inspiration has given us
understanding. But we have gathered within walls which bear testimony to
the self-sacrificing, persevering efforts of a few young men, to whom
we owe the origin and development of all that excites our admiration in
this completed enterprise; and I might consider my task as finished if I
contented myself with borrowing the last word of the architect's epitaph
and only saying, Look around you!
The reports of the librarian have told or will tell you, in some detail,
what has been accomplished since the 21st of December, 1874, when six
gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch to discuss
different projects for a medical library. In less than four years from
that time, by the liberality of associations and of individuals, this
collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five thousand pamphlets,
and of one hundred and twenty-five journals, regularly received,--all
worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof,--has come into being under
our eyes. It has sprung up, as it were, in the night like a mushroom; it
stands before us in full daylight as lusty as an oak, and promising to
grow and flourish in the perennial freshness of an evergreen.
To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of books,
exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive medical
libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well adapted to
its present needs? We will not point out individually all those younger
members of the profession who have accomplished what their fathers and
elder brethren had attempted and partially achieved. We need not write
their names on these walls, after the fashion of those civic dignitaries
who immortalize themselves on tablets of marble and gates of iron. But
their contemporaries know them well, and their descendants will not
forget them,--the men who first met together, the men who have given
their time and their money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of
the strenuous agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to
his eyelids, until he had gained his ends; the untiring, imperturbable,
tenacious, irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested
nor let others rest until the success of the project was assured. If,
against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only my
revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while he was
urging on the undertaking in which he has been preeminently active and
triumphantly successful.
We must not forget the various medical libraries which preceded this:
that of an earlier period, when Boston contained about seventy regular
practitioners, the collection afterwards transferred to the Boston
Athenaeum; the two collections belonging to the University; the
Treadwell Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital; the collections
of the two societies, that for Medical Improvement and that for Medical
Observation; and more especially the ten thousand volumes relating to
medicine belonging to our noble public city library,--too many blossoms
on the tree of knowledge, perhaps, for the best fruit to ripen. But the
Massachusetts Medical Society now numbers nearly four hundred members in
the city of Boston. The time had arrived for a new and larger movement.
There was needed a place to which every respectable member of the
medical profession could obtain easy access; where, under one roof, all
might find the special information they were seeking; where the latest
medical intelligence should be spread out daily as the shipping news is
posted on the bulletins of the exchange; where men engaged in a common
pursuit could meet, surrounded by the mute oracles of science and art;
where the whole atmosphere should be as full of professional knowledge
as the apothecary's shop is of the odor of his medicaments. This was
what the old men longed for,--the prophets and kings of the profession,
who
“Desired it long,
But died without the sight.”
This is what the young men and those who worked under their guidance
undertook to give us. And now such a library, such a reading-room, such
an exchange, such an intellectual and social meeting place, we behold a
fact, plain before us. The medical profession of our city, and, let us
add, of all those neighboring places which it can reach with its iron
arms, is united as never before by the commune vinculum, the common bond
of a large, enduring, ennobling, unselfish interest. It breathes a new
air of awakened intelligence. It marches abreast of the other
learned professions, which have long had their extensive and valuable
centralized libraries; abreast of them, but not promising to be content
with that position. What glorifies a town like a cathedral? What
dignifies a province like a university? What illuminates a country
like its scholarship, and what is the nest that hatches scholars but a
library?
The physician, some may say, is a practical man and has little use for
all this book-learning. Every student has heard Sydenham's reply to Sir
Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,--meaning
medical books. “Read Don Quixote,” was his famous answer. But Sydenham
himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at
least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in
reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books,
great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense
without erudition is better than a learned one without common sense, but
the thorough master of his profession must have learning added to his
natural gifts.
It is not necessary to maintain the direct practical utility of all
kinds of learning. Our shelves contain many books which only a certain
class of medical scholars will be likely to consult. There is a dead
medical literature, and there is a live one. The dead is not all
ancient, the live is not all modern. There is none, modern or ancient,
which, if it has no living value for the student, will not teach him
something by its autopsy. But it is with the live literature of his
profession that the medical practitioner is first of all concerned.
Now there has come a great change in our time over the form in
which living thought presents itself. The first printed books,--the
incunabula,--were inclosed in boards of solid oak, with brazen clasps
and corners; the boards by and by were replaced by pasteboard covered
with calf or sheepskin; then cloth came in and took the place of
leather; then the pasteboard was covered with paper instead of cloth;
and at this day the quarterly, the monthly, the weekly periodical in its
flimsy unsupported dress of paper, and the daily journal, naked as
it came from the womb of the press, hold the larger part of the fresh
reading we live upon. We must have the latest thought in its latest
expression; the page must be newly turned like the morning bannock; the
pamphlet must be newly opened like the ante-prandial oyster.
Thus a library, to meet the need of our time, must take, and must spread
out in a convenient form, a great array of periodicals. Our active
practitioners read these by preference over almost everything else. Our
specialists, more particularly, depend on the month's product, on the
yearly crop of new facts, new suggestions, new contrivances, as much
as the farmer on the annual yield of his acres. One of the first wants,
then, of the profession is supplied by our library in its great array of
periodicals from many lands, in many languages. Such a number of medical
periodicals no private library would have room for, no private person
would pay for, or flood his tables with if they were sent him for
nothing. These, I think, with the reports of medical societies and the
papers contributed to them, will form the most attractive part of
our accumulated medical treasures. They will be also one of our chief
expenses, for these journals must be bound in volumes and they require
a great amount of shelf-room; all this, in addition to the cost of
subscription for those which are not furnished us gratuitously.
It is true that the value of old scientific periodicals is, other things
being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the obvious reason
that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a series is drained
off into the standard works with which the intelligent practitioner is
supposed to be familiar. But no extended record of facts grows too old
to be useful, provided only that we have a ready and sure way of getting
at the particular fact or facts we are in search of.
And this leads me to speak of what I conceive to be one of the principal
tasks to be performed by the present and the coming generation of
scholars, not only in the medical, but in every department of knowledge.
I mean the formation of indexes, and more especially of indexes to
periodical literature.
This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who
have had occasion to follow out any special subject. I have a right to
speak of it, for I long ago attempted to supply the want of indexes in
some small measure for my own need. I had a very complete set of the
“American Journal of the Medical Sciences;” an entire set of the “North
American Review,” and many volumes of the reprints of the three leading
British quarterlies. Of what use were they to me without general
indexes? I looked them all through carefully and made classified lists
of all the articles I thought I should most care to read. But they soon
outgrew my lists. The “North American Review” kept filling up shelf
after shelf, rich in articles which I often wanted to consult, but what
a labor to find them, until the index of Mr. Gushing, published a few
months since, made the contents of these hundred and twenty volumes as
easily accessible as the words in a dictionary! I had a copy of good Dr.
Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia, a treasure-house to my boyhood which has
not lost its value for me in later years. But where to look for what I
wanted? I wished to know, for instance, what Dr. Burney had to say about
singing. Who would have looked for it under the Italian word cantare? I
was curious to learn something of the etchings of Rembrandt, and
where should I find it but under the head “Low Countries, Engravers
of the,”--an elaborate and most valuable article of a hundred
double-columned close-printed quarto pages, to which no reference, even,
is made under the title Rembrandt.
There was nothing to be done, if I wanted to know where that which I
specially cared for was to be found in my Rees's Cyclopaedia, but to
look over every page of its forty-one quarto volumes and make out
a brief list of matters of interest which I could not find by their
titles, and this I did, at no small expense of time and trouble.
Nothing, therefore, could be more pleasing to me than to see the
attention which has been given of late years to the great work of
indexing. It is a quarter of a century since Mr. Poole published his
“Index to Periodical Literature,” which it is much to be hoped is soon
to appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable dimensions
by the additions of so long a period. The “British and Foreign Medical
Review,” edited by the late Sir John Forties, contributed to by Huxley,
Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most distinguished scientific men
of Great Britain, has an index to its twenty-four volumes, and by its
aid I find this valuable series as manageable as a lexicon. The last
edition of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” had a complete index in a
separate volume, and the publishers of Appletons' “American Cyclopaedia”
have recently issued an index to their useful work, which must greatly
add to its value. I have already referred to the index to the “North
American Review,” which to an American, and especially to a New
Englander, is the most interesting and most valuable addition of its
kind to our literary apparatus since the publication of Mr. Allibone's
“Dictionary of Authors.” I might almost dare to parody Mr. Webster's
words in speaking of Hamilton, to describe what Mr. Gushing did for the
solemn rows of back volumes of our honored old Review which had been
long fossilizing on our shelves: “He touched the dead corpse of the
'North American,' and it sprang to its feet.” A library of the best
thought of the best American scholars during the greater portion of the
century was brought to light by the work of the indexmaker as truly as
were the Assyrian tablets by the labors of Layard.
A great portion of the best writing and reading--literary, scientific,
professional, miscellaneous--comes to us now, at stated intervals, in
paper covers. The writer appears, as it were, in his shirt-sleeves. As
soon as he has delivered his message the book-binder puts a coat on
his back, and he joins the forlorn brotherhood of “back volumes,” than
which, so long as they are unindexed, nothing can be more exasperating.
Who wants a lock without a key, a ship without a rudder, a binnacle
without a compass, a check without a signature, a greenback without a
goldback behind it?
I have referred chiefly to the medical journals, but I would include
with these the reports of medical associations, and those separate
publications which, coming in the form of pamphlets, heap themselves
into chaotic piles and bundles which are worse than useless, taking up a
great deal of room, and frightening everything away but mice and mousing
antiquarians, or possibly at long intervals some terebrating specialist.
Arranged, bound, indexed, all these at once become accessible and
valuable. I will take the first instance which happens to suggest
itself. How many who know all about osteoblasts and the experiments of
Ollier, and all that has grown out of them, know where to go for a paper
by the late Dr. A. L. Peirson of Salem, published in the year 1840,
under the modest title, Remarks on Fractures? And if any practitioner
who has to deal with broken bones does not know that most excellent
and practical essay, it is a great pity, for it answers very numerous
questions which will be sure to suggest themselves to the surgeon and
the patient as no one of the recent treatises, on my own shelves, at
least, can do.
But if indexing is the special need of our time in medical literature,
as in every department of knowledge, it must be remembered that it
is not only an immense labor, but one that never ends. It requires,
therefore, the cooperation of a large number of individuals to do the
work, and a large amount of money to pay for making its results public
through the press. When it is remembered that the catalogue of the
library of the British Museum is contained in nearly three thousand
large folios of manuscript, and not all its books are yet included, the
task of indexing any considerable branch of science or literature looks
as if it were well nigh impossible. But many hands make light work. An
“Index Society” has been formed in England, already numbering about one
hundred and seventy members. It aims at “supplying thorough indexes
to valuable works and collections which have hitherto lacked them; at
issuing indexes to the literature of special subjects; and at gathering
materials for a general reference index.” This society has published a
little treatise setting forth the history and the art of indexing, which
I trust is in the hands of some of our members, if not upon our shelves.
Something has been done in the same direction by individuals in our own
country, as we have already seen. The need of it in the department of
medicine is beginning to be clearly felt. Our library has already an
admirable catalogue with cross references, the work of a number of its
younger members cooperating in the task. A very intelligent medical
student, Mr. William D. Chapin, whose excellent project is indorsed by
well-known New York physicians and professors, proposes to publish a
yearly index to original communications in the medical journals of the
United States, classified by authors and subjects. But it is from the
National Medical Library at Washington that we have the best promise
and the largest expectations. That great and growing collection of fifty
thousand volumes is under the eye and hand of a librarian who knows
books and how to manage them. For libraries are the standing armies
of civilization, and an army is but a mob without a general who can
organize and marshal it so as to make it effective. The “Specimen
Fasciculus of a Catalogue of the National Medical Library,” prepared
under the direction of Dr. Billings, the librarian, would have excited
the admiration of Haller, the master scholar in medical science of
the last century, or rather of the profession in all centuries, and if
carried out as it is begun will be to the nineteenth all and more
than all that the three Bibliothecae--Anatomica, Chirurgica, and
Medicinae-Practicae--were to the eighteenth century. I cannot forget
the story that Agassiz was so fond of telling of the king of Prussia and
Fichte. It was after the humiliation and spoliation of the kingdom by
Napoleon that the monarch asked the philosopher what could be done
to regain the lost position of the nation. “Found a great university,
Sire,” was the answer, and so it was that in the year 1810 the
world-renowned University of Berlin came into being. I believe that we
in this country can do better than found a national university, whose
professors shall be nominated in caucuses, go in and out, perhaps, like
postmasters, with every change of administration, and deal with science
in the face of their constituency as the courtier did with time when
his sovereign asked him what o'clock it was: “Whatever hour your majesty
pleases.” But when we have a noble library like that at Washington, and
a librarian of exceptional qualifications like the gentleman who now
holds that office, I believe that a liberal appropriation by Congress
to carry out a conscientious work for the advancement of sound knowledge
and the bettering of human conditions, like this which Dr. Billings
has so well begun, would redound greatly to the honor of the nation. It
ought to be willing to be at some charge to make its treasures useful to
its citizens, and, for its own sake, especially to that class which has
charge of health, public and private. This country abounds in what
are called “self-made men,” and is justly proud of many whom it thus
designates. In one sense no man is self-made who breathes the air of a
civilized community. In another sense every man who is anything other
than a phonograph on legs is self-made. But if we award his just praise
to the man who has attained any kind of excellence without having had
the same advantages as others whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or
surpassed, let us not be betrayed into undervaluing the mechanic's
careful training to his business, the thorough and laborious education
of the scholar and the professional man.
Our American atmosphere is vocal with the flippant loquacity of half
knowledge. We must accept whatever good can be got out of it, and keep
it under as we do sorrel and mullein and witchgrass, by enriching the
soil, and sowing good seed in plenty; by good teaching and good books,
rather than by wasting our time in talking against it. Half knowledge
dreads nothing but whole knowledge.
I have spoken of the importance and the predominance of periodical
literature, and have attempted to do justice to its value. But the
almost exclusive reading of it is not without its dangers. The journals
contain much that is crude and unsound; the presumption, it might be
maintained, is against their novelties, unless they come from observers
of established credit. Yet I have known a practitioner,--perhaps more
than one,--who was as much under the dominant influence of the last
article he had read in his favorite medical journal as a milliner under
the sway of the last fashion-plate. The difference between green and
seasoned knowledge is very great, and such practitioners never hold long
enough to any of their knowledge to have it get seasoned.